Fatboy Slim - The Rockafeller Skank | Het verhaal achter het nummer
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN links it mostly for the glimpse of Cook's studio and his decades-old Atari ST, and as an example of a sample-based track.
What it is
A Dutch Top 2000 a gogo segment in which Norman Cook (Fatboy Slim) explains how The Rockafeller Skank is built, in his studio. The studio shows a long-running Atari ST setup.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2021 to 2021.
What Hacker News said
Recommends dijit · 2021-06 · on “The parallel universe of FireWire hubs”
> It seems those old Macs may still be in service in niche applications, most notably in audio processing chains at radio stations or recording studios. Highly recommend looking at the tour of fat-boy slims recording studio for an example of this kind of airgapped system in active use for decades: [this video] (Though he uses an Atari ST, which is known for being a musical powerhouse)
Recommends zbuf · 2021-09 · on “Atari ST in daily use since 1985 [video]”
Not just any old musician, here's Norman Cook (Fatboy Slim) in his studio in 2018: Still with Atari ST switched on, connected to the gear, and loading in old floppies of "The Rockerfeller Skank" from the 90s: [this video] YouTube commentor says "it's like a living museum that should be kept alive" ... agree!
Cites hnlmorg · 2021-11 · on “When Radiohead sampled Paul Lansky (2000)”
Maybe now, but when Kid A was recorded hardware was a little more limited. So you'd spend a lot more time hunting for what sounded like good samples than you would ingest everything and see what sounded good. These days it's pretty trivial to do the digital equivalent of "jamming with your band mates" when it comes to sampling but in the 90s you had to develop an ear for it because the process of capturing a sample through to cuing it in your tracker was longer and a lot more painful than what we take for granted now. And you often had to create all of your own samples, there weren't web sites you could download these things from like there are today. Even percussion needed to be sampled if
Cites hnlmorg · 2021-11 · on “Hammerhead Rhythm Station (1997)”
> In hip hop it was most certainly taken from the vinyl, as samplers with the required storage were still quite pricy at the time Hardware samplers were. But a lot of home studios had an Atari ST or Amiga. Plus regardless of the hardware used, those samples would have to be stored somewhere (even on hardware samplers) to be able to playback in the first place. I mean how else are you going to sequence it, save it when you're done and recall it again after? A lot of hardware from that era, and especially the Atari ST and Amiga, would have floppy drives and it was pretty common for people to share a sample disks. I've posted this before but here is a video of Norman Cook showing off his Atari
Cites hnlmorg · 2021-11 · on “Vinegar: Safari extension that replaces YouTube embeds with HTML5 video tags”
> Right, yeah, that's why I said _copyrightable_ samples.. e.g. sampling a sound from just about anywhere and slotting it into a tracker or drum machine is probably fine. I was talking about copyrighted samples. eg Fatboy Slim - Rockafella Skank: [this video] Daft Punk: [LINK] Prodigy: [LINK] ...and these are just 3 headline artists. Sampling was common place in the underground scene too. eg The Amen break is a percussion loop that basically invented Jungle and early Drum and Bass, and that was a copyrighted loop too: [LINK] > I do agree the waters get muddy once it's multiple seconds long.. IANAL but there's the famous vanilla ice lawsuit, and I think there was some fair use wiggle room if it's